Weekend Rundown: Pulver, Beebe Earn Wins Outside Chicago

Following a miserable two-year stretch, Jens Pulver
has started 2011 off on the right foot -- sort of.

The onetime
UFC lightweight champion took a three-round split decision over
Wade
Choate in the main event of
Chicago Cagefighting Championship 3 on Saturday, reportedly
breaking his left foot in the process. The show went down at The
Odeum in the Chicago suburb of Villa Park, Ill.

Pulver, 36, came close to finishing his opponent with punches in
the opening frame. Choate survived, however, and gave the smaller
and seemingly tentative “Little Evil” trouble with range in the
second and third rounds.

In the end, scorecards of 29-28, 29-28 and 28-29 gave Pulver the
narrow decision, after which the Washington native revealed that he
had injured his foot -- by then discolored and grotesquely swollen
-- in the first five minutes of the bout. The win was Pulver’s
second in a row, his first such stretch since April 2006.

Deep
veteran Seo Hee Ham
successfully defended her CMA KPW women’s 115-pound title on Sunday
with a two-round unanimous decision over Anna Saito at
Gladiator
15. The win inside Kawasaki City Gymnasium in Kanagawa, Japan,
was the South Korean’s third in a 10-day span and came just two
days before her 24th birthday.

Prior to besting Saito, “Hamderlei Silva” -- as Ham has been dubbed
for her frenetic and reckless standup style -- earned a unanimous
nod against Jewels standout Saori
Ishioka at Deep “52
Impact” on Feb. 25. Ham then scored a second-round technical
knockout of the experienced Megumi
Yabushita in a kickboxing bout at Gladiator
14 on Feb. 27.

Also victorious at Gladiator 15 was Ryuta Noji,
who retained his CMA KPW heavyweight belt by stopping South Korea’s
Hee
Seok Song in the show’s main event. The big men slung leather
for 63 seconds until the karateka felled Song in a corner and
pounded away, forcing referee Kenichi
Serizawa to intervene. Noji has now won three in a row since
losing to Yoshiyuki
Nakanishi in the April 2010 finals of Deep’s light heavyweight
title tournament.